


The Walking Man

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post Season 4, Retirement, Sussex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9300089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: When it was all over, when the east wind had blown through and they picked themselves off the pavement, Sherlock saidenough.Eighteen years later, the real journey begins.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This started out with some feel-good lyricism to get my writing groove back after having my heart stopped and stomped upon too many times the last two Sundays. But it turned into an idfic - I'm an avid walker/hiker - and ultimately I decided to post it anyway, because I can't be the only one who needs a defibrillator to finish watching Season 4. It kind of calls for the same story from John's POV, and that may be something I tackle at some time, but this is complete as is.

In the end, when the work is done, when there is nothing left to prove, and no one who cares to remember, there is still life to be lived.

The words he spoke that day, rising above the blood pounding in his veins, soaring above the roar of the east wind in his ears, are alive in no one’s memory but his own. True words. Heartfelt words. The truest, bravest words he has ever uttered. 

Words he has lived by for eighteen years now. 

_Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own._

When they were chewed up, and spat out on the ground, mangled remnants of broken men, held together only with grit and guts and bygone glory, Sherlock said _no more._

He’d walked away from London, from 221B, from cases, from his brilliant accomplishments, his horrific failures. Bodies on the pavement, in the morgue, on desert sand, in littered allies. Blood on his shoes, his face. Blood on his hands. Blood oozing from his shattered chest, her mangled gut. Metaphoric. Real. Under his nails. Staining his skin.

Perhaps he hides, or perhaps he waits. He’s taken a cottage in Sussex, and he is not short of visitors, some that drop in for a romp through the mind palace, and others who bring tea and biscuits or deliveries from town. He lives alone, as he must. It’s for the best. A necessity, not a choice.

Rebuilt on the same chassis, he is a reimagined update of a failed design. 

He indulges in an occasional cigarette, but he’s been otherwise clean all these years. It is easier here, away from the bustle of London, easier in his new profession, easier because he has solved the final problem, and knows at last to whom his life belongs.

The game is on, and it is a frustrating game, and a long one, this waiting game.

And while he lives by himself, he is not a lonely man.

There is the work. He is solving riddles still, putting together pieces of trails long grown cold. He’d walked into a meeting of the Sussex Archaeological Society on a lark, and fallen into a field of forensics he’d never even imagined. The coldest of cold cases. Mysteries long buried. Intrigue without danger, but no less fascinating. And time – always enough time to solve because no one is balancing on a knife’s edge, slipping away in a hospital bed, stepping in front of an assassin’s bullet.

There are the visits to London for case research at the British Museum, the London Library. Meetings with Lestrade – official consultations for which Sherlock is paid a standard fee. Meetings which never leave Lestrade’s office. 

And there is John.

Seventeen stair steps up to John’s door where Sherlock is always welcome, where the tea is ambrosia and his chair cradles him and there is a Sherlock-shaped depression on the sofa not allowed to grow too cold too long. 

John and his daughter, and John’s job in the A&E at Bart’s. John at 221B, watching over a surprisingly spry Mrs. Hudson. Demons dead, his trigger finger no longer itches. He is free to be the man he wants to be. A physician. A father. A friend. Like Sherlock, he’s been leveled and reborn, stripped to bone, remade, reimagined.

He joins Sherlock at times, in Lestrade’s cramped office, and receives his own consulting fee, and they all walk to a pub together after. There is no hat, no coat, no cane, no gun. John couldn’t climb a fire escape if his life depended on it these days, and Sherlock, who once knew the back alleys of London like the veins in the crook of his arm, is now more in tune with the flight patterns of the bees that visit his garden.

They grow, together and apart, but they are barely out of adolescence, though John has raised a child, has taken her on play dates and hosted sleepovers and, on one recent, notable occasion, begged Sherlock to investigate a particularly suspicious boyfriend who turns out to be as ordinary and white bread as he appears on the surface. Sherlock, too, is settling into his skin, this new skin. The skin that doesn’t prickle with need, but that still burns. A slow burn, a consistent fire, banked, contained. An ember saved to be carried and nurtured and tended until the next camp is reached, the next milestone on the journey.

While John is raising his daughter, who has entered those difficult teen years, and attending to the business of watching rather helplessly as she moulds herself – his wishes and hopes to the contrary be damned – into a curious amalgamation of the best and worst of both her parents, Sherlock discovers walking. 

He’s been walking for nearly fifty years already, of course, but only as a necessary means of locomotion, with the goal of transporting the transport when other modes are illogical or unavailable. 

But suddenly – brilliantly, beautifully, amazingly – he is walking because he loves to walk.

He seldom has anywhere he has to be, though as he walks, he discovers places to hold his attention for hours or days or weeks. He stops to pick apart lichen and moss, to poke his finger into rotting stumps to catalog the punk, to sort through stones at the ocean’s edge. He sleeps in rooms above pubs, pubs with names like The King of Prussia and Ye Dolphin and The Hairy Dog. Names that, in another day, John might have borrowed for cases in his blog. He eats when he’s hungry, and goes through a dozen pairs of shoes, and there is stubble on his face and a sea wind at his back.

Britain is made for walking, and Sherlock walks all the famous footpaths, and all the not-so-famous ones, and oftentimes he strays off path and wanders through places he has no business being. He walks to Winchester from Eastbourne, from Dover to Farnham, the Anglesey Coast Path. To Portpatrick on the Southern Upward Way. One late spring day, four years, five, after he began to walk, he leaves his home, starts up the path to town, and turns up, some days later, on the outskirts of London.

Mrs. Hudson’s niece has moved in to help care for her, Rosie has gone off to uni, and the wind is from the west.

It is a good omen.

He takes his time, breathing in London as he traverses familiar paths. He won’t linger long. Either it is time, or it isn’t. 

Mrs. Hudson kisses his cheeks, runs her gnarled hand over his stubbled face. 

“I think of you every day,” he acknowledges as he studies her face, sees the truth in her eyes.

“I know you do, Sherlock. I know.”

John smiles when he sees him. John doesn’t know his hair is too long, that he’s missed a spot shaving. That his eyes are the same blue.

John, it turns out, thinks it is lovely weather for a walk.

They go down the stairs together, but John stops with a frown, and goes back up for something forgotten. Sherlock waits for him outside– five minutes, ten. His heart beats large in a chest too small, and he stoops to retie his shoes, pauses to watch a cabbie argue with a cop. It holds his interest, and he works it all out in a minute’s time, but it doesn’t distract him from the matter at hand. 

Walking does that to a man, he’s found. Clears the mind. Sharpens focus. He’s emptied the Mind Palace of a decade of flotsam and jetsam. His head feels lighter, his heart fuller, and his feet have wings.

He leans against the wall, takes out a cigarette from a tightly-wrapped pack, and lights it. He inhales deeply, and closes his eyes to think.

He gets only the single drag, because John plucks the fag from his hand and crushes it out against the bricks.

He is carrying a backpack now, and a bottle of water. He’s changed into sturdy trainers, and has an odd, determined look on his face. He turns and locks the door, and glances up at the sky. 

“Umbrella?” he says, with a small frown, and a glance at the door behind them.

Sherlock raises his eyes to the cloudless sky and shakes his head. There’s no sign of rain, and he’s spent so many years living in the present day that he can hardly think ahead to tomorrow.

“Alright then.”

John shoulders the backpack, and they walk away together. Cabs approach and slip away, and they walk past bus stops and tube stations. An occasional, innocuous black car zips by in a blur.

Conversation is easy when the walls aren’t closing in, when your next step is not over a precipice, when the burn under your skin has finally faded into a bearable tightness, like skin pulled too taut after hours in the sun.

And at the end of the day, there’s a pub, with fish and chips and a pint for each. There’s a room over the pub with two beds and a shared bath, a window facing west, soft pillows and warm quilts. Two toothbrushes, two pair of reading glasses, two wallets, and a set of keys that John won’t be using for a very long time.

John groans as he settles on his back, stretching out his legs while Sherlock examines John’s shoes and adjusts the laces and frowns at the insoles. He lines up the shoes beside his own, on the floor beneath the window, and stares at them with their west-pointing toes, then back at John, stretched out on one side of the narrow bed.

He sits carefully on the end of the bed, back to John, and tentatively lowers a hand until it rests on John’s foot, fingers wrapping around to the arch, pressing up until John sighs and flexes his toes.

Sherlock pulls a knee up and turns halfway, looking over his shoulder to see a man he doesn’t know, boneless, blissful, eyes closed, cares left behind on the doorstep.

He imagines that, for John, this is a most unexpected journey.

It is a rebirth, a day they’ll always mark, a birthday of sorts, a death and a resurrection. They’re snakes who shed their skin, chameleons who try on many colours, and they’ve come to this point along paths that diverge, and cross, and sometimes collide.

But now they’ll walk together.

There’s an empty bed in the morning, and a single bare foot outside the cover at the end of the other. Sherlock wakes first, and pulls in his cold foot, blinking against the morning light, thinking of tea.

His mobile beeps, and he reaches over John, fumbling for his glasses. He doesn’t need them to know what the message says. He reads it though, because Mrs. Hudson, on into her nineties, still sends it to him every day, because all those years ago, he asked her to, and has never told her to stop.

But today – ah, today he reads something quite different.

_Not all those who wander are lost._

“What’s that?” John’s voice is morning rough, and he squints, looking at the unfamiliar picture of Sherlock with reading glasses perched on his nose.

“A message from Mrs. Hudson,” he says, dropping the mobile on the bed and folding up the glasses. “She’s undoubtedly quoting something I should know, but I don’t. Tea?”

John turns onto his side and smiles. “Only if you’re making it.”

Sherlock rises to turn on the kettle, and watches as John carelessly picks up his mobile, and thumbs it open. “You don’t mind?” he asks.

Sherlock shrugs. He doesn’t mind. He wants tea. He wants this normal to be his forever normal. He wants John to use his mobile and climb over him in the morning to use the loo. He wants this life that is not his own to be John’s life – for John to _know_ this as irrevocably as he knows that his feet hurt and his hair has long turned grey.

He’s flips on the kettle and hears behind him John’s chuckle.

“God I love her,” John says and Sherlock turns to see his eyes crinkle with amusement, his mouth turn up whimsically at the corners. He shakes his head, rests the phone on his belly and closes his eyes.

And Sherlock knows there is a message here, that the words mean something more to John than their face value alone. That he’s heard them before, said them before, shared this _thing_ with Mrs. Hudson at least. 

He doesn’t know – cannot know – that John, too, has been waiting.

“Where are we heading?” John asks as he sips mediocre tea that is better than any he has ever had.

“Isle of Wight,” Sherlock answers. “Tennyson lived there once.”

“Queen Victoria,” John adds.

Sherlock looks blank, but John does not offer a history lesson, and as payment in kind, Sherlock, _this_ Sherlock, does not quote Tennyson.

_fin_

_Twilight and evening bell,_  
And after that the dark!  
And may there be no sadness of farewell,  
When I embark  
-from _Crossing the Bar_ by Alfred Lord Tennyson


End file.
